How much is too much to pay for a beer?

Jamie Cook, guitarist for Arctic Monkeys, obviously draws the line at £11 for a drink. Faced with a traumatic £22 bill for two beers at the Met Bar in Mayfair this week, he refused to pay and was, said the Daily Mirror, "bundled out of the back doors" for his troubles. "I mean, £22! It's a disgrace," he seethed, having presumably calculated that he could have bought 10 pints of real ale in his home town of Sheffield for the same price - and had change for three packets of pork scratchings.

According to Camra, the Campaign for Real Ale, Cook was being asked to pay well over the odds, even for an award-winning pop starlet. The average pint of lager in London costs £2.64 (bitter is £2.42), while England's cheapest drinking spot is the north-west (£2.21 for lager, £1.97 for bitter). But beware: high-alcohol foreign imports and opportunistic restaurateurs are catching boozers by surprise. Next time you're splashing out on a five-course meal in Chelsea, think twice before ordering a bottle of the Belgian brew Deus.

It might cost you more than £30.

"I've heard of bars near London Bridge where you are charged as much as £8 for a 7% beer," says Owen Morgan, of Camra. "But if he was just drinking bottled lager, then £22 for two is rather outrageous. We would say that you should be trying to spend as close to the average as possible."

So what, exactly, was Cook drinking? A call to the Met Bar proved unenlightening. "I heard about the incident," said an employee dryly. "But I'm not allowed to tell you how much our beer costs. The only way you can buy a beer from us is to be a member of the bar or a guest at the Metropolitan hotel." The cheapest room costs £325. Better make mine a half.